Seller Terms

Who these are for

These Seller Terms apply to anyone who sets up a farm or sells on the PlantHarvester Market. They add to the Terms of Use, which also apply to you. General Applications LLC ("we", "us") runs PlantHarvester.

Selling as an independent business

• You must be at least 18, and have the authority to act for the farm you set up.
• You are an independent seller, not our employee or agent. You are the seller of record for what you sell: the buyer's charge shows your farm's name, and you are responsible for your products.
• You complete Stripe's identity and payout verification. We never hold your bank details.
• You are responsible for the licences, registrations, permits, food-safety practices, labels and taxes that apply to what you sell where you sell it.

What you may sell

Whole, fresh, unprocessed produce your farm grew (fruit, vegetables, herbs, grains, nuts, dry beans and the like, rinsed of soil but not cut, cooked or otherwise processed); seeds; and live plants. Listings are made from the PlantHarvester Library, so each one names a real crop or variety.

What you may not sell

• Meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, honey or any other animal product.
• Processed or prepared food: anything cut, sliced, cooked, canned, pickled, fermented, baked, juiced, dried with additives or otherwise processed, even if a cottage-food law lets you sell it elsewhere.
• A plant the Library's hazard review marks as severely toxic, in any form, or a plant marked toxic to eat, as food. PlantHarvester blocks these automatically.
• Seeds or plants of any species on a federal or state noxious-weed, invasive-species or quarantine list for the buyer's or your state. Checking your state's list is your responsibility.
• Cannabis, hemp, or any controlled or illegal plant or product.
• Anything recalled, spoiled, contaminated, or treated with a pesticide not approved for that crop.
• Anything you did not grow, or may not legally sell where you or the buyer are.

Listings

Keep every listing true: the crop and variety, quantity, price, picked date or harvest window, and sell-by date. Remove or update a listing when it sells out or stops being fresh. Your notes on a listing must describe that listing, not advertise anything else.

How you say a listing is grown must be true of that listing. Only an operation certified under the USDA National Organic Program may call its produce organic or certified organic, and a listing that claims it names the certifier; we may ask to see the certificate and remove a claim you cannot support.

Orders

• Keep your hours true. A buyer chooses one of the pickup times you keep, so be at your pickup location for the whole of every one you offer. Buyers can order for a pickup time until 1 hour before it ends.
• If you will be away, enter the days in your hours before buyers order for them. A buyer who already holds a paid order on one of those days is told by email, and you must move that order to another of your times or refund it.
• Fulfil or cancel every paid order promptly. Use the order's messages for anything the buyer needs to know, and answer buyers within a reasonable time.
• If you cannot supply something, refund those items from your dashboard and say why; cancelling a paid order refunds the buyer for everything left on it.
• Answer a buyer's refund request promptly, and give a reason if you decline. Buyers may ask any time before the order is picked up or delivered and for 48 hours after; that is PlantHarvester's minimum, and you may offer more. If you do not answer, or decline a request PlantHarvester finds justified, we may refund the buyer from your balance.
• If a buyer does not pick up within 3 days of the pickup time they chose, you may cancel the order and refund them.

Delivery

Delivery is optional. If you offer it from a pickup location, you set how far you drive, your delivery fee, the smallest order you deliver and your delivery times, and you make the delivery yourself or through someone acting for you. PlantHarvester does not deliver, and gives you no driver, route or vehicle.

• Buyers can order for a delivery time until 3 hours before it starts. You see a buyer's address once their order is paid, and not before. Use it only to deliver that order.
• Deliver within the time the buyer chose. Mark your orders out for delivery when you set out, which tells each buyer, and mark each delivered when it is handed over or left at the address the buyer gave. The order is the buyer's from then. If you leave an order with nobody there, we recommend taking a photo for your records.
• The delivery fee is yours, less our platform fee. It is refunded to the buyer whenever the delivery is not made: you cancel, cannot supply the order, or do not come. Once an order is delivered the fee stays with you, even if you later refund something in it. If a buyer reports that a delivery marked delivered never arrived and that is found to be so, the fee is refunded with the order.
• You are responsible for the vehicle, its insurance, the people who drive for you, and keeping the food safe on the way.

Fees and payouts

We keep a platform fee of 10% of each order's subtotal and of any delivery fee you charge. There is no listing fee and no monthly fee, card processing is paid out of our fee, and the buyer pays the price you list. The only other charge is the $4 for an early payout you ask for. Each order a buyer places with your farm must reach a minimum, shown in their cart; it is $10 today.

Your money is held by Stripe, in your farm's own Stripe account, until it is sent to your bank. Your first payout is sent on the first Friday after your first sale has cleared, whatever its size. After that we send your available balance every Friday once it is $100 or more. A smaller balance carries forward to a later Friday. No balance waits more than 180 days: one that has is sent on the next Friday whatever its size. You can ask for a balance of $10 or more early; an early payout costs $4, and by asking you agree that we take that charge from your Stripe balance. If you close your farm, or we remove it, we send your whole balance once your open orders are settled, at no charge.

Refunds and disputes are taken from your balance first. When an order or part of one is refunded, that share of your payout is reversed and that share of our fee is returned: we keep nothing on what is refunded. We will give you at least 30 days' notice of any fee change, and it will not apply to orders placed before it.

Disputes and chargebacks

If a buyer disputes a charge on your order with their bank, Stripe takes the disputed amount from us first. We may reverse your payout for that order while the dispute is decided. If the dispute is lost because the order was not fulfilled or was not as described, you bear the amount and any dispute fee; if it is won, the reversed payout is returned to you.

Taxes

You are responsible for income tax on your sales; Stripe may send you a Form 1099-K. You are also responsible for any sales tax on what you sell, unless the law makes PlantHarvester collect it as a marketplace facilitator in your state; we will tell you before we start collecting it anywhere.

Suspension and removal

We may hide a listing or suspend a farm at any time for safety, suspected fraud, reports from buyers, or a breach of these terms. Paid orders stay open for you to fulfil or refund while a farm is suspended. You may stop selling at any time; fulfil or refund your open orders first.

Your confirmation

By setting up a farm you confirm that you have read these Seller Terms and the Terms of Use, and that you follow the food-safety, licensing and tax rules that apply to what you sell in your state.

Contact

General Applications LLC, [email protected].